Ethics of Boiler Ragging

Each year my company requires its employees to participate in an on-line ethics awareness training program. They require this in case one of us commits an ethical sin, they can show the courts it was not the company’s fault since the employee was ethically trained. It protects them from getting sued because they’ve hired a bunch of email porn swapping derelicts, gift-accepting whores posing as managers and coked-up salespeople. And data pirate janitors.

I completed the ethics training this morning. It presented a combination of video and text instruction with pictures of appropriate looking individuals from all races, sexes, creeds and colors. But, surprisingly, no fat people. I guess the fat people in the company only work in the particular office I’m based out of. Multiple choice quiz questions followed each section to make sure the employee paid attention. I didn’t pay attention to most of the instruction. The excitement level caused me to doze a little. When the questions appeared, I chose the least fun or most imbecilic obvious answer, and that was enough to get by. Wait a minute, you mean I’m not supposed to make copies of my co-workers' medical records I happened to come across while breaking into the Human Resources office to find out what kind of raises others received and distribute them to everybody in the company? You got me on that one.

At one of the rare occasions I was paying attention, I heard the austere, yet comforting, but slightly impudently tainted voice of the narrator say that I “am the face of the company”. At that moment I happened to be doing some boiler ragging, which is a polite way I invented to say I was scratching my crotch. From the inside of my pants. My mom used to scold me at the dinner table when I talked about my crotch scratching exploits, so I began referring to it as boiler ragging, and she was none the wiser. She thinks boiler ragging has something to do with my job. In fact, she’s proud of my boiler ragging, and will ask me to tell strangers in the street about it. So I do. And they stay strangers.

So, I’m sitting slumped in my chair, with my hand inside my sweatpants tending the crotch itch, wearing the same crumb, sweat and stain ridden shirt I’ve worn all week, unshowered, and my hair, which I haven’t had cut in about a year and three months, is slumber-combed and in my face, and I hear this man tell me I am the face of the company (I work at home, by the way). Imagine the pride that demand instilled in me. Not to mention the trepidation. THIS is the face of the company? This slouchy, rag-donning, shaggy, smelly, boiler ragging mess is the face of our company? Is this why I haven’t gotten a raise in three years? Who is our marketing director, the Coen brothers?

Luckily, there is nothing in the ethics rules against boiler ragging, as long as it is done discreetly and not on top of other people’s desks. I wasn’t sure about this rule, having ignored most of the training, so I called the Ethics Compliance Office to make sure. The lady who answered the phone happened to be one of the strangers my mom and I met in the street once, so she was well versed in boiler ragging. I hope to see a section on proper office boiler ragging in next year’s training session.

Boiled Grapes

I’ve been feeling somewhat melancholy lately. I don’t know, maybe it’s the weather. It’s been awfully wintery around here – cold, snowy, cloudy, rubbery, full spittoons all over the place, bouncy mailmen scratching at the window. You know, wintery. I’ve never been one to suffer SAD. For those who do not know, SAD is an acronym for Sad Anno Domini, or Sad in the year of our lord. I have no idea what that has to do with winter, but people tend to get it during this season. I don’t think I have it, since I'm agnostic.

Regardless of the reason for my mopes, when I get to feeling this way, there is only one cure. Boiling grapes. I think Paul McCartney said it best:

When I find myself in times of trouble, mother Mary dances with apes,
speaking words of wisdom, boil some grapes.

So that’s what I did.

I always boil green grapes because green grapes are grapes of diminished hopes, as portrayed in John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Diminshed Hopes. It’s the lesser known companion novel to Grapes of Wrath, which refers to the evil purple grapes, the kind used to make Goofy Grape soft drink. Just add water and you have a pitcher full of wrath.

Can you feel the evil?????

As you can see the boiling has robbed the grapes of their glorius natural muted emerald pigment. The grapes’ brilliance has been reduced to the luster of pickled orbs of flavorless gelatin. If you could feel these grapes you would sense mushiness, not unlike that of the breasts of a long retired wet nurse. Not that I’ve felt up any long retired wet nurses. Not recently, anyway. Ahhh, memories. The smell of these grapes elicits thoughts of rancid green beans, dragged across a pewter tray coated in turnip marmalade. Smell for yourself using the miracle of cyber scratch ‘n sniff. Keep scratching and smelling your monitor on the graphic below until you smell something. Don’t get discouraged if you don’t smell something right away. Keep scratching. And sniffing.

You gave up, didn’t you? I knew it. Quitter. It’s not your fault. That one may be broken. Here. Try this one.

At this point you may be wondering, sure the condition of these boiled grapes is dire, to be sure, but how does that mend an anguished soul? Surely the boiling of grapes does not exude an elixir of ecstasy, does it? No, it does not. But with introspection and a lucid focus on those boiling grapes, tumbling in the torrents of the sauce pan, and later to lie embarrassingly exposed, mutilated and ruptured, on a forlorn paper plate, one sardonically realizes, at least I am not a boiled grape.

I feel so good now.